The head coach who led the Victoria Royals to 199 regular season wins and another 21 in the playoffs will be behind the bench for the NHL’s Los Angeles Kings for the 2017-2018 season. He joins new Kings head coach John Steven’s new staff but leaves a big hole in Victoria for General Manager Cameron Hope to fill. Will he look in-house for his replacement, or is there a better option out there somewhere else?

Now look, I know what you are thinking. Who are you and why do you think you can just make your own draft rankings? Now that’s a great question and one I’m going to ignore and just get to my exclusive 2017 NHL DRAFT RANKINGS!

We have chronicled 2011 through 2013 in previous editions of the series, and now for the last one. 2014 is the final draft year that we can really judge since the players in the 2015 and 2016 drafts haven’t played enough at this point in their careers.

In the first two WHL Bantam Drafts in Victoria, there were a few hits and a few more misses. However, the 2012 Draft was a big improvement over the previous year, despite the fact that the four of their last five picks never played a game in the Western Hockey League.

The 2013 Draft is also an improvement on the 2012 one, so let’s take a look at how General Manager Cameron Hope did.

Welcome to Part Two of our series on the Victoria Royals and their short WHL Bantam Draft history. In the first part, we saw how Victoria left a lot of players on the table who turned out to be studs but is that also true for the 2012 draft that gave Royals’ fans Tyler Soy and Chaz Reddekopp?

It’s been a week since the 2017 WHL Bantam Draft which saw the Royals take 12 players over 12 rounds. The future success of these 15-year-old players is unknown, and it really is a crapshoot if a player picked in the first round or the eleventh round will ever play a game in the WHL.

When looking at the most recent Bantam Draft, it got me thinking about the success of the draft picks under General Manager Cameron Hope since the Royals moved to Victoria from Chilliwack in 2011. What percentage of his picks turned into WHL players and who were, in hindsight, the better players left on the table? Let’s take a look.